You wouldn’t have to have lived in that vague historical period (somewhere between Sir Walter Raleigh and Horatio Nelson) to have met a Cap'n Codd. His politics are those shared by every rabid right-winger throughout the ages.

Tall, witty, with a body like whipcord, and a laser-like intellect, he fits none of these descriptions. He has the sex appeal of a syphilitic baboon, and his breath has been known to stun a rhino at twenty paces. On top of all that his you-don’t-sweat-much-for-a-fat-girl attempts at seduction have made his name legend along the Barbary Coast.

Cap'n Codd is hardly the stuff from which popular heroes are made, and yet his eleven year run in Britain’s largest regional newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, has elevated him to cult status. People know where they stand with him, and it’s usually upwind. He may be a moral vacuum on legs, but he learned his seamanship the hard way, and he says out loud the things that most of us hardly dare think.

His chicken-livered bo’sun Bunty is the bespectacled PC intellectual who’s as popular on board the Saucy Mare as a fart in a spacesuit. He used to be a primary school teacher, and represents the kind, out-of-touch face of academia that one would never tire kicking.

Bunty wandered onto the ship whilst collecting for The Home For The Bewildered, and was promptly kidnapped. He quickly adapted to life on board, and cheerfully decided to stay, even though the crew still cheerfully and regularly try to throw him overboard. His hobby is cataloguing cardboard, and his ambition is to be kissed. Preferably by a woman.

Cap'n Codd’s nemesis The Admiral (R.N.) is a product of the historical British private school system. Charterhouse, Eton, Oxford, then thirty years in the Coldstream Guards before he realised he’d joined the army by mistake.

After a brief career dashing off letters to his relatives in the House Of Lords, he managed the transition to the Navy, starting as a lowly Rear Admiral where his extensive knowledge of punting stood him in good stead.

Cap'n Codd is more than just a cartoon strip, it’s a commentary, a literary and artistic lancing of society’s boils sliced open with irreverent wit and dressed with cold compresses of irony.

On top of all that, it’s funny. Hey, why not buy it?